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Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 1,123
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The Strange Death of Marxism
One book I would recommend above all to this forum to help many posters understand that without realisuing it and thinking they are libertarians when they hold left-wing views is -
Paul Gottfried’s The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. The review can be found in the April 2006 issue of Chronicles.
I have one major problem with Paul Gottfried’s latest book The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium and that is its title, which does not really fit the book. Prof. Gottfried describes how Marxism as an economic theory has lost its appeal, even among the Left, since the Second World War. Today’s leftists no longer advocate nationalization of the economy and anti-capitalist theories. In fact, they hardly care about economics at all, but focus on changing the moral and cultural foundations of Western society. This shift, Gottfried points out, originated with the so-called Frankfurt School, a group of originally German Marxist philosophers who settled in the United States in the 1930s, where they came to dominate liberal thinking, not so much by advocating anti-capitalist economic reform but rather by propagating social engineering.
Their ideas returned to Europe after WWII, together with the wave of American pop culture swamping the Old Continent, and have thoroughly destroyed traditional European culture and morality. In this way Europe’s post-war infatuation with America has been its undoing. The “incentive to social engineering,” says Gottfried, “has gone from the Old to the New World and then back again and in the process altered Europe even more dramatically than us.” That, to me, is the important message of this book, which deserves a large audience.
Gottfried is right when he says that the multicultural orientation of the contemporary European Left has little to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. Indeed, the traditional electorate of Europe’s old (Marxist) Left today overwhelmingly vote for the parties of the so-called “extreme Right,” while the new (post-Marxist) Left caters for a new electorate that is hostile to the traditional moral and cultural values of the old Left’s former electorate with its conservative social attitudes. This phenomenon, to which Gottfried draws our attention, is confirmed by sociological studies of the electorate of Europe’s highly succesful anti-immigration parties, such as France’s Front National, Belgium’s Vlaams Blok, Denmark’s Dansk Folkeparti, whose appeal resides in their opposition to multiculturalism and their defense of national cultural identity.
These parties are among those most critical of American liberal pop culture with its multicultural, hedonistic orientation. Interestingly, Germany lacks a similar party. Readers of Prof. Gottfried’s book will know why. He describes in detail how after WWII, American social engineers in the US occupational army in Germany applied the theories of the Frankfurt School to reeducate the Germans by developing programs designed to eradicate the cultural identity of the German people. The authorities in the former East-German GDR took greater pride in the heroes of Germany’s past than those in the West, for whom any pride in aspects of German culture and history was regarded as potentially dangerous and a highway to Nazism.
Apart from a long introduction and a conclusion, Gottfried’s book consists of four chapters, dealing with Postwar Communism, Neomarxism, the Post-Marxist Left and the Post-Marxist Left as a political religion. The latter is probably the most interesting for American readers, as it also was to me, an atypical – because pro-American – European. I think it clarifies why the post-Marxist, multicultural social engineering has wreaked such devastating damage in Europe during the past three decades, while America, where Frankfurter School philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse developed their destructive ideas, remained relatively unaffected. Instead of using the state’s power to alter the economic framework of society or promote income redistribution, the Frankfurter School proposed to use the state as a radicalizing cultural force.
According to Prof. Gottfried this shift from economics to culture means the death of Marxism, because Marxism is an economic theory. He claims that the views of the no-longer extant communist parties on women and family life resembled those of pre-Vatican 2 Catholics. On this point I disagree with prof. Gottfried. Though Karl Marx never propagated sexual promiscuity, homosexuality and other “alternative” lifestyles, it should be noted, however, that Ludwig von Mises in his 1922 book Socialism pointed out – correctly I think – that Socialism demands promiscuity in sexual life because it consciously neglects the contractual idea:
“Free love is the socialist’s radical solution for sexual problems […] The family disappears and society is confronted with separate individuals only. Choice in love becomes completely free. Men and women unite and separate just as their desires urge.”
The Socialist paradigm, which entails the deliberate neglect of any contract or moral principle that does not serve the current political objectives of the State, results in both the expansion of sexual liberty and the disappearance of economic liberty. Economic liberty and prosperity cannot exist unless people are true to their promises and the assumed set of moral rules by which partners are bound within a certain culture. Consequently, Socialism leads to the disappearance of all forms of partnership. Nothing is left but the individual and the State.
Gottfried does not address this, but it is interesting to read how Richard Posner in his 1992 book Sex and Reason observed that the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s became “aligned with those of the student radicals of the 1960s for whom sexual liberty and political liberty were, as they had been to their guru, Herbert Marcuse, two sides of the same coin, while economic liberty they considered a mask for exploitation.” Although Posner is a libertarian, who agrees with the outcome of the Supreme Court decisions on moral issues, he disagrees with the Court’s Marcusean arguments.
Whether or not Marcuse and the other Frankfurter School philosophers can be considered true Marxists (as Mises would argue) or not (as Gottfried implies) seems to me a matter of secondary importance. It is certainly true, as Prof. Gottfried writes, that the traditional European Marxist parties, when they had most of the votes of their traditional electorate, never attempted to change the traditional, almost Victorian social and moral behaviour of their blue-collar voters. It is also true that the European Left adopted this agenda when its leaders became white-collar intellectuals infatuated with what they perceived to be American culture, but what in essence is only the liberal fringe of American culture. An icon of the latter, for example, is the montly magazine Playboy, which is generally considered to be as American as apple pie and which is never regarded as a socialist, let alone Marxist, social engineering vehicle.
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